I could tell this was not going to be a typical meeting with a college representative. He walked into my office with absolutely no hurry, as if this was all he had to do all day, and talked about his school from the heart, not from a memory-committed checklist of things someone else told him to say. When I asked questions, he left a space between when I stopped talking, and when he started his answer, never once referring me to the school’s website, or the college catalog. This was clearly a guy who knew his school as well as he knew his middle name.

It was also notable that he didn’t talk about his school in some theoretical abstract. We do that a lot in college admissions, where we talk about a college in the third person, like it’s some kind of god. He mostly talked about the students at his school, what they were doing, what they liked about being there. He knew that’s what makes the college experience work for a student—who you go to school with. He wasn’t going to waste my time reciting scores and rankings, because Rugg’s could tell me about scores, and rankings were, well, pretty pointless. If you have time to talk with someone face-to-face, the conversation should be a giving of self, not of data, and that meant talking about things that mattered. What matters most in college is the students.

After he said everything he thought I should know, he got up and gave me his card. As I recall, he said something about how he’d like to hear from me, but the university had made it kind of hard to get hold of him, with a student aide and a secretary standing between him and every incoming call, but he urged me to persist. After he’d left, I read his card, and realized I’d just spent forty-five minutes talking to a Director of Admissions who had made a cold call to my high school.

That was my introduction to Tom Weede, who passed on earlier this month, leaving this world and our profession all the poorer. The outpouring of loss has come from all circles of our field, and it all contains one common message; Tom was the rare person who not only felt you mattered; he made sure you knew you mattered. He trusted you with his opinion, and trusted that you would step up and let him know how you felt in turn, even if you saw things differently. His advocacy in the profession was focused on students, and when he engaged you in conversation, you felt, as George Bailey once said, that he knew you all the way to your back collar button.

Tom’s come to mind quite a bit this summer, and not just because of his passing. I’ve been besieged by a number of students and parents flooding my office with requests to make college plans, and they’re all ninth and tenth graders. One father called and insisted he had to meet with me right away, since his son was a junior, and had no college plans at all. The student’s name wasn’t familiar to me, so I looked him up. Turns out he was a sophomore, but since his father called the day after school was over, calling his son a junior made things sound more important, I guess.

That’s the kind of month it’s been. One parent wants to meet to talk about “college strategy,” another one is convinced his ninth grader’s chances at graduate school are already shot because the student has no plans for this summer. It’s easy enough to get caught up in the mania the media is peddling as college readiness, but it’s never hit the ninth and tenth graders like this before. Worse, it seems to be hitting their parents, and too many of them are succumbing to the herd mentality of college angst, abandoning their post as sentinels of their children’s youth.

If there’s any remedy to this, I’d like to think it’s the calm, listening voice of the Tom Weedes that are still with us. Tom did most of his preaching to admissions officers, and none of us were smart enough to ever ask him if he’d thought about saying this to kids and families. Since similar voices are doing the same thing, it’s time to ask them to broaden their scope, before SAT flash cards become the in gift for bar mitzvahs.

Voices like Ken Anselment, Heath Einstein, and Tamara Siler do a very nice job of reminding colleagues that that the college selection process is all about the kids. What’s needed now is for them to share their insights with a larger audience, giving kids permission to be kids. It would be a great way to honor Tom’s memory. Better still, it would be the right thing to do for our world.

It’s been an incredibly wet spring here in Michigan, so bad that I’ve had three students ask me about colleges that offer dual degrees in shipbuilding and animal husbandry. To make matters worse, the cloudy atmosphere outside seems to have influenced what’s going on inside the world of college admissions, at least as far as media coverage is concerned.

For reasons that are hard to explain, the usual torrent of Colleges See Record Application Year stories has been replaced by an addiction to three story lines that have held the public’s attention longer than fidget spinners. What’s especially puzzling about the focus on these trio of topics is that, at least in the quietude of their offices behind closed doors, most admissions personnel and college counselors respond to them by asking, “What’s the big deal?”

While articles abound offering insights on what these Big Three could mean to the future of college counseling, it might be important to understand how long these issues have already been with us, before we offer any conjecture on what should be influencing the field come this fall.

Story Line 1: Rich People Use Their Money to Get Special Treatment

When it comes to themes the media jumps on, what more could you ask for than a story that involves money, movies stars, and college admissions? This could explain the lingering fascination with the Varsity Blues/Aunt Becky story, but the real issue behind the story isn’t really news at all. From opening night tickets on Broadway to neighborhoods with the best schools to the best time and tables at Michelin restaurants, the wealthy and famous are always using their leverage and reputation to get advantages the rest of us simply can’t access.

This has been just as true in college admissions for years, and that’s not even close to being the secret the media is suggesting it is. When explaining how his alma mater builds an admissions class, an alumnus admissions representative unabashedly told me about twenty percent of the seats at his school automatically goes to children of alumni, “children of US Senators, and (people like) Tom Hanks’s son (NOTE—no, this is not the college attended by any of Tom Hanks’s sons). We do this, because we can.” Having recently paid many times more than the face value for Hamilton tickets, the effect of the wealthy on limited resources isn’t lost on me, and any college that has more applicants than seats is a limited resource.

Story Line 2: Colleges Think About Where Their Applicants Come From

The fallout of the Aunt Becky story had mercifully faded from the public’s radar right around the time College Board announced it has been developing an additional measure for colleges to use that aims to provide context about applicants’ backgrounds. Labelled as an “adversity index”, the score uses public data based on things like zip codes and crime rates to offer insights into where students were raised, and where they went to high school.

Once again, the response of most veteran admission officers to this news was “been there, done that, and have the spreadsheets to prove it.” College admissions officers have used socioeconomic factors for years when dealing with the tricky issue of evaluating applicants across different schools, including intangible factors that defy measurement. Since this has long been part of the art of college admissions, the notion that this is a new addition to the soup of decision making is specious. Adopting the College Board scale may lead to some changes in admissions decisions, but that’s more of a rearrangement of data than incorporation of new data. Not much to see here.

Story Line 3: Students Who Do Dumb Things Can Get Kicked Out of College

The only real question raised by Harvard’s removal of Kyle Kashov from next year’s freshman class for racist remarks on social media is how much the media would have covered this story if a) Kyle wasn’t a survivor of the Parkland shooting, or b) if this action had been taken by Southeast Michigan Tech rather than Harvard.

The admissions offer of every college—that’s every college—reminds the student that the offer is tentative, and can be revoked for any number of reasons. If your last semester as a high school senior shows your A-B average is now in the D-F range, we’ll wish you well. If it turns out you didn’t really write those admissions essays and we find out two years after you’ve been with us as a student, you’ll finish college somewhere else. If you make public remarks questioning the right of some of your fellow students to simply exist, that just won’t sit well with us. This really, really, isn’t news.

Real Issues for Next Fall

My hope is that the two months of sunshine will melt away America’s fascination over the last three months with admissions stories obsessed with the obvious, and we can move on to tackle issues that can move our profession, and our society, forward. Do highly selective colleges really spend less time recruiting urban and rural schools, simply because they’re harder to get to? Since there is no such thing as “free” college, what can really be done to get more students into and through college without a mountain of debt? How in the world does any student qualify for full cost of attendance aid and still have to choose between buying books and eating? These may not make for the most tranquil topics to consider whiling away a summer’s day in a hammock, but they remind us our work has ample purpose beyond board reports, yield ratios, and social media hits.

First Thought: Kelley at IU is by far the best back-door into America’s top business programs. It’s curriculum and graduates are highly respected by the on-campus recruiting community, which is where the action really is if you want to get a good job once you graduate. The admissions standards at Kelley, while they are far higher than they were ten years ago, are still far less onerous than those at any of the other undergraduate business programs on the list.

Second Thought: Cornell got what it wanted by reorganizing its business/hospitality programs in recent years. They are now regularly mentioned as one of only two Ivy League colleges in the big leagues in terms undergraduate business. Penn no longer has a monopoly on this designation, which is exactly what Cornell was aiming for with the revamp.

Third Thought: There is no excuse for a high-flying aspiring undergraduate business student not to have heard from at least a third of colleges on his or her list by February 1 if he or she is developing his or her college list correctly. Six colleges on the list below offer some form of Early Action (Michigan, UVA, UNC, Notre Dame, MIT) or Rolling Decision (IU). Meanwhile, UT offers Priority (11/1), and Penn, Cornell, NYU, and Carnegie Mellon offer Early Decision. Just as in the world of business, in the world of undergraduate admission, the early bird gets the worm! Get your act together early if you want to give yourself the best shot of admission into colleges deemed to offer the best business programs in the USA.

Final Thought: The list is definitely larger than last year when only ten colleges made this list because of a tie for seventh place. While more colleges are included, we are certainly happy to see the likes of USC and IU added over Boston College, Emory, Penn State and the like. From our experience there is a definite difference between both the quality of the student and the quality of the student experience at colleges included on the above list and colleges not making the list. U.S. should try to not include any more colleges than thirteen on this list in future years unless a current pretender dramatically alters its undergraduate programming and/or its admissions processes.